The Best President Money Can Buy

In addition to the five companies already known to have paid ’consultation fees’ into Michael Cohen’s slush-fund shell company Essential Consultants LLC, there now comes news that President Trump’s personal attorney Michael Cohen unsuccessfully attempted to shake down Ford Motor Company as part of this racket as well

According to this account, Cohen approached the company's office in Washington, D.C. over the phone to discuss possible consulting work, but was rejected by Ford’s head of government affairs, Ziad Ojakli who promptly told him to take a hike.

The bad news for Michael Cohen is quite how Robert Mueller’s investigators managed to find out about this approach many months ago, even though no cash changed hands and there was no monetary trail to follow. There are two possibilities: either the FBI already had a phone-tap in place on Michael Cohen and recorded the original conversation, or else the Ford Motor Company were so outraged by the brazen corruption of the approach that they promptly reported it to the authorities.

Michael Avenatti the combative attorney representing Stormy Daniels who was the first person to disclose details of the bribe monies paid by AT&T and Novartis has recently published another statement on Twitter:

“Let this serve as formal notice – there is significantly more evidence and facts to come relating to Mr. Cohen’s dealings and Mr. Trump’s knowledge and involvement. You can come clean now or wait to be outed. Your choice. We have only just begun.”

Expect to see an avalanche of similar revelations from many other major corporations with lobbying interests in Washington DC in the near future.

Meanwhile there is renewed speculation that Robert Mueller obtained a number of important investigative leads into the web of corruption surrounding the Trump presidency by studying details of the donations supposedly made to finance Donald Trump’s inauguration in January 2017.

Just over a year ago, political reporter Christina Wilkie (then of Huffington Post, now of CNBC) asked the public to help her pore over the Donald Trump campaign’s list of supposed inauguration donors. That crowdsourced effort quickly exposed that many of the donations were from fake names, fake companies and fake addresses too.

Virtually none of the record-breaking $106.7 million raised by the inauguration committee, has been accounted for, and only a tiny fraction has been donated to charity either. Thomas Barrack a financier and close friend of Donald Trump who chaired the Inaugural committee was recently revealed to be one of the witnesses questioned by Robert Muellers’s investigators.

Re: The Best President Money Can Buy

By a curious coincidence, the Chinese government has decided to invest $500m in an Indonesian theme park that features Trump-branded hotels and golf courses, according to a recent article in National Review.

A subsidiary of Chinese state-owned construction firm Metallurgical Corporation of China (MCC) signed a deal last week with the Indonesian firm MNC Land to build an “integrated lifestyle resort,” as part of Beijing’s global influence-expanding “Belt and Road” infrastructure initiative.

The Trump properties are considered flagship elements of the theme park, according to MNC marketing materials, and internal documents obtained by Agency France-Presse show Trump’s sons have been directly involved in its planning.

The news may help to explain the otherwise perplexing volte-face by president Trump on the subject of Chinese Telecom company ZTE who announced only days ago that they were being forced to close down entirely because of American trade sanctions that would impact their ability to obtain key hardware and software resources.

Having loudly denounced China for “Raping the USA” and “Stealing American jobs” throughout his 2016 presidential election campaign, Donald Trump suddenly demonstrated a new-found concern for the welfare of Chinese workers and their possible loss of employment in the following recent Tweets:

“President Xi of China, and I, are working together to give massive Chinese phone company, ZTE, a way to get back into business, fast. Too many jobs in China lost. Commerce Department has been instructed to get it done!”

“ZTE, the large Chinese phone company, buys a big percentage of individual parts from U.S. companies. This is also reflective of the larger trade deal we are negotiating with China and my personal relationship with President Xi.”

Re: The Best President Money Can Buy

There has been much curiosity about how bank details of Trump attorney Michael Cohen became known to Stormy Daniel’s attorney Michael Avenatti. An inquiry was launched by the Inspector General of the US Treasury Department to investigate the leaks

According to a report published Wednesday by New Yorker, the source was a whistleblower within law enforcement who became concerned when they discovered that official documents known as SARs (suspicious activity reports) which previously existed on the FINCEN (financial crimes enforcement network) database had suddenly started to go missing.

Banks are legally mandated to file suspicious-activity reports with the government in order to call attention to activity that resembles money laundering, fraud, and other criminal conduct.

These reports are routed to a permanent database maintained by FINCEN, which can be searched by tens of thousands of law-enforcement and other federal government personnel. The reports are a routine response to any financial activity that appears suspicious.

They are not proof of criminal activity, and often do not result in criminal charges, though the information in them can be used in law-enforcement proceedings.

The New Yorker’s source continued: “I have never seen something pulled off the system… That system is a safeguard for the bank. It’s a stockpile of information. When something’s not there that should be, I immediately became concerned.” The official added, “That’s why I came forward.”

Some speculated that FINCEN may have restricted access to the reports due to the sensitivity of their content, which they said would be nearly unprecedented. A former prosecutor who spent years working with the FINCEN database said that she knew of no mechanism for restricting access to SARs.

To say that I am terrified right now would be an understatement,” the official said of the potential legal consequences. “We’ve accepted this as normal, and this is not normal,” the official said of the disappearing documents. “Things that stand out as abnormal, like documents being removed from a system, are of grave concern to me… This is a terrifying time to be an American, to be in this situation, and to watch all of this unfold.”